It’s a loaded question, naturally, and from a player perspective it depends upon whether you’re in the all-lightsabers-all-the-time camp or whether you enjoyed the fact that SWG simulated many different aspects of a galaxy far, far away.

In terms of performance, Koster debunks a lot myths about the “failure” of the game in terms of player numbers and financials. The title picked up “more new users a day than all other SOE games combined, even after the Combat Upgrade,” he notes. “The game wasn’t doing as badly as people seem to think. It didn’t fail in the market. It did just fine, even by the standards pre-WoW,” Koster explains. “But there were huge expectations that we didn’t push against, it launched with serious problems, and the team wasn’t really equipped to fix them. This resulted in a series of errors that damaged the game’s ongoing viability, which resulted in more hurried changes.”Read more

You know what they say: You can’t keep a Sith emperor down. After rumors of his demise were proved premature, the shadowy big bad of Star Wars: The Old Republic has risen to take the center stage of his very own update.

Game Update 3.2: Rise of the Emperor will hit SWTOR tomorrow, bringing with it the ancient Sith capital planet of Ziost as well as the continuation of the Shadow of Revan storyline. Players will reunite with NPCs Lana Beniko and Theron Shan to figure out what the Emperor is up to as well as combat the Sixth Line Jedi.

At this point, it’s probably not overly obvious, but we have created Sword and Bored in story arcs. And this comic represents the ending of the second arc.

This also represents the first comic that doesn’t really include Mo. I feels a bit weird to have a comic without him, but I thought it appropriate to experiment. We want Mo to be the main protagonist in the comic, but we believe that the actual funny parts aren’t necessarily him but the things that happen around and to him.

At any rate, Mo will be back next week. Until then, here’s this week’s comic…

The days of coddling solo players through a massively multiplayer experience are over — at least according to one upstart indie MMO.

Meet The Saga of Lucimia, an in-development sandbox that eschews solo content for 100% “group-based emergent gameplay” in a dangerous and hostile environment. Players will need at least three other friends and a whole lot of supplies to head out into the wild to look for adventures, progress through the epic story, and find trainers for the skill-based character system.

The team says that it’s intentionally returning to the era of early EverQuest to reintroduce true danger and group cooperation into the MMO genre. Players will have to contend with multiple languages, corpse runs, and a lack of healing magic in their journeys.

It’s no small understatement to say that DUST 514 has failed to achieve the same following and numbers that its big sibling, EVE Online, has. So perhaps you can’t blame CCP when it attempts to leech off of EVE by creating, say, EVE-themed armor skins for DUST 514.

Coming tomorrow, the first dozen DUST 514 SKINs will give players a way to dress up their soldiers in the fashion of their favorite battleships. No, that is not a sentence we thought we’d be writing when we got up this morning. The armor skins draw inspiration from the colors and patterns of popular EVE Online ships, and will be purchasable both in the cash shop and through in-game ISK.

This may be the start of a trend for DUST 514, as CCP said that it has many more SKINs in the works for future updates.

Let’s assume you’ve just recently gotten to the level cap in Final Fantasy XIV and you’re ready to start in on catching up to the main scenario before Heavensward drops. Where do you start?

I don’t really agree with the official decision to gate people out of Ishgard if they haven’t cleared the story up through the 2.55 patch, but it was made and I didn’t get a vote there, so it’s kind of academic. The point is that if you’re hitting that level for the first time, you have five major patches of stuff between you and getting to Ishgard in June. So how do you make sure that your fresh character can get all the way up there? Is it even possible?

The answer is most definitely yes, but you’re going to have to put some time in. Most of the gating you’ll have to deal with, though, is a matter of getting the gear you need to take on the later challenges that the story throws at you.

Player-owned towns have been in the works for a while now, as the team has used veteran Ultima Online guild PaxLair as a “guinea pig” to construct the first permanent player settlement. Such towns will use a pre-designed template on which to create a personalized village.

Other Release 17 goodies include the summon phoenix skill, the new Soltown Sewers area, a damaged version of Solace Bridge, and 16 additional fence styles.

Some pretty big changes are on their way to Landmark, not the least of which is the final full character wipe and an extensive land reformation. Anticipation is certainly high for the new biomes, and to say many testers are looking forward to finally keeping character progression into the open beta phase and launch is an understatement! But that’s only a small part of the new build: The achievement, crafting, and harvesting systems are all getting their own facelifts.

With so many modifications incoming, players may not be too surprised to learn that the big wipe will happen later than anticipated; instead of April 29th, the wipe is postponed until the week after. At least that gives everyone a bit more time to digest all of the information, including these new details we’ve gathered from our talk with Senior Producer Terry Michaels and Lead Designer Darrin McPherson.Read more

There’s something about the apocalypse that makes a world 100% more awesome, isn’t there? People get more creative, previously undeveloped mutated powers come into the light, and there are Thunderdomes everywhere.

That’s why it might be worth keeping an eye on one post-apocalyptic sci-fi MMO, Novus Inceptio. Being developed by a single person, Novus Inceptio aims to create an alien world where players will come together for “hardcore survival action, tactics, and strategy” in order to rebuild the world.

The sandbox aims to have some sort of aging and death system, although there will be clones to offset the loss. The main focus will be on establishing and building up player settlements with the aid of technology and supernatural abilities. You can get a look at the (quite pretty) pre-alpha world after the break.

“In my opinion, settlement recruiting activities in the wider MMO community continue to be almost zero,” Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dancey posted on the forums. “Collectively we need to be raising awareness about individual settlement AWESOME. […] We need recruiting activity in the EVE community. I don’t know what the best vehicle is for that, so any and all suggestions are welcome. Settlements that are committed to growing should have someone delegated to be visible in these places making regular posts and talking about the cool stuff their Settlement is doing. When the wider community sees activity and fun, that is a powerful attractant.”

If you were hoping that the Russian version of Lord of the Rings Online would last forever, we have some sad news for you today. The game’s localized servers will be shutting down on June 1st, with new account registration already disabled and all cash shop items discounted to cost just 1 mark. There’s also an NPC to power your character up in case you weren’t already at maximum level for whatever reason.

It’s not clear at this time whether Mail.ru was unwilling or unable to reach an agreement with Warner Bros. for extending the license for the game. Bonuses are being offered for Russian players affected by the shutdown in the other games that Mail.ru maintains.

I didn’t get a whole lot of gaming time this weekend, but I did manage to log a couple of hours in GTA Online. I mostly ran heists with pickup groups, but I also bought my first aircraft and spent a fair few minutes flying around snapping screenshots and prepping video clips for use in Rockstar’s editor.

How about you, MOP readers? What did you do in your MMOs this weekend?

Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!